But suburban-style layouts create long commutes and regular traffic jams in electronic circuits, wasting time and energy.

In Rebooting Computing, a special issue of the IEEE Computer journal, the team describes its new approach as Nano-Engineered Computing Systems Technology, or N3XT.

N3XT will break data bottlenecks by integrating processors and memory like floors in a skyscraper and by connecting these components with millions of "vias," which play the role of tiny electronic elevators. The N3XT high-rise approach will move more data, much faster, using far less energy, than would be possible using low-rise circuits.

"We have assembled a group of top thinkers and advanced technologies to create a platform that can meet the computing demands of the future," Mitra said.

Shifting electronics from a low-rise to a high-rise architecture will demand huge investments from industry – and the promise of big payoffs for making the switch.

A multi-campus team led by Stanford engineers Subhasish Mitra and H.-S. Philip Wong has developed a revolutionary high-rise architecture for computing.

To enable these advances, the N3XT team uses new nano-materials that allow its designs to do what can't be done with silicon – build high-rise computer circuits.

"With N3XT the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts," said co-author and Stanford electrical engineering Professor Kunle Olukotun, who is helping optimize how software and hardware interact.

New transistor and memory materials
Engineers have previously tried to stack silicon chips but with limited success, said Mohamed M. Sabry Aly, a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford and first author of the paper.

Fabricating a silicon chip requires temperatures close to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, making it extremely challenging to build a silicon chip atop another without damaging the first layer. The current approach to what are called 3-D, or stacked, chips is to construct two silicon chips separately, then stack them and connect them with a few thousand wires.

But conventional, 3-D silicon chips are still prone to traffic jams and it takes a lot of energy to push data through what are a relatively few connecting wires.

The N3XT team is taking a radically different approach: building layers of processors and memory directly atop one another, connected by millions of electronic elevators that can move more data over shorter distances that traditional wire, using less energy. The N3XT approach is to immerse computation and memory storage into an electronic super-device.

The key is the use of non-silicon materials that can be fabricated at much lower temperatures than silicon, so that processors can be built on top of memory without the new layer damaging the layer below.

N3XT high-rise chips are based on carbon nanotube transistors (CNTs). Transistors are fundamental units of a computer processor, the tiny on-off switches that create digital zeroes and ones. CNTs are faster and more energy-efficient than silicon processors. Moreover, in the N3XT architecture, they can be fabricated and placed over and below other layers of memory.

Just as skyscrapers have ventilation systems, N3XT high-rise chip designs incorporate thermal cooling layers. This work, led by Stanford mechanical engineers Kenneth Goodson and Mehdi Asheghi, ensures that the heat rising from the stacked layers of electronics does not degrade overall system performance.

Proof of principle

Mitra and Wong have already demonstrated a working prototype of a high-rise chip. At the International Electron Devices Meeting in December 2014 they unveiled a four-layered chip made up of two layers of RRAM memory sandwiched between two layers of CNTs.

In their N3XT paper they ran simulations showing how their high-rise approach was a thousand times more efficient in carrying out many important and highly demanding industrial software applications.

Stanford computer scientist and N3XT co-author Chris Ré, who recently won a "genius grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, said he joined the N3XT collaboration to make sure that computing doesn’t enter what some call a "dark data" era.

"There are huge volumes of data that sit within our reach and are relevant to some of society's most pressing problems from health care to climate change, but we lack the computational horsepower to bring this data to light and use it," Re said. “As we all hope in the N3XT project, we may have to boost horsepower to solve some of these pressing challenges.”